Vehicle operators tend to spend a significant amount of time in their respective vehicles particularly when commuting from a home to a workplace, running errands, conducting business, vacationing, or for many other reasons. This time is significant enough that some vehicles come equipped with a variety of consumer electronics such as compact disc (CD) players, cassette tape players, radios, satellite radios, electronic gaming, and digital video disc (DVD) players. Some owners may also choose to equip their vehicle with aftermarket consumer electronics in the event their vehicles lack such consumer electronics or for purposes of customization. These and other entertainment or infotainment electronic devices provide a passenger in the vehicle with time-occupying options and may improve the passenger's quality of time.
Consumer electronics such as CD players, cassette tape players, DVD players, and electronic gaming generally have related media content for playback residing on a localized storage medium. For example, many on-board navigation systems utilize geographic information stored on CDs. This information may be downloaded to a memory specifically associated with the navigation system, located in the vehicle, or directly accessed from the CD by the navigation system. In another example, CD players commonly play media that is stored on CD. Most of these playback devices can accept one or a limited number of storage media during operation and thereby generally have a relatively limited capacity of media selection. For example, a CD player with a six-disc CD changer has a selection of music tracks that are limited to any six CDs contained in the CD changer.
With multimedia that is stored on various mediums, such as CD or DVD, the preservation of digital rights management (DRM) has become prominent. In more recent times, preservation of DRM is of particular concern for digital multimedia. For example, many performances that are recorded onto CDs are copyright protected. Additionally, access to such recordings may be limited to certain types of playback devices in an attempt to prevent unauthorized duplication of the recordings. For example, some CDs may be limited to playback on a conventional stand-alone CD player having a read-only operation but not on a CD drive found to accompany personal computers where unauthorized duplication may occur.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide a multimedia data storage system for a vehicle that stores a variety of multimedia files therein while preserving DRM. In addition, it is desirable to provide a hard disk drive for a vehicle having embedded content corresponding to downloadable multimedia files that may be synchronized with a remote data storage device. Furthermore, it is desirable to provide a electronic vehicle storage system that stores status and diagnostic information regarding a variety of vehicle electrical systems and subsystems for future retrieval. Finally, other desirable features and characteristics of the present invention will become apparent from the subsequent detailed description and the appended claims, taken in conjunction with the accompanying drawings and the foregoing technical field and background.